“Beth, have you had breakfast?” Angelo asked.
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“Nothing since before the show last night?” He seized her by the arm firmly. “I’m going to treat you like Matt treated your kid last night. Come on, march.” He conducted her to the coffee shop across the street from the hospital, and refused to say a word until she had eaten eggs and potatoes and toast and was starting on her second cup of coffee.
“Mind if I smoke, Beth? Look, staying here was a fool trick, especially now. I got one hell of a lecture from Marg for letting you.” Tommy wondered when he had had time to talk to Margot.
“Oh, she told you—”
Angelo nodded, and Beth went on, “Ordinarily, while Tom was out of the act, I’d work the cats myself; they’re used to me, and Tom would expect it. Now, though—”
“Cardiff said he could handle it,” Angelo told her, blowing a smoke ring. “Your trailer is in a trailer park eight blocks away from here, and here are the keys to your car. Matt and Papa Tony are picking us up here in half an hour. But before that I have to settle it about the kid. We can get along without him for two, three days if you really need him. He can catch up with the show in Ruidoso—”
“You’re very kind, Angelo. But with Tom laid up, Lambeth won’t want anyone else out of the show. Will you ask Ma Leighty to give him a bed?”
“Don’t you worry about that. There’s plenty of room in our trailer, and we all got used to having him around this winter. He and Matt get along just fine.”
“I don’t like to impose—”
“Impose, nothing! Look, he’s part of the act—you know how Papa is about family.” Angelo leaned on his chin in his big hands. “I know what’s bothering you, Beth. But I’ll look out for him. I got a kid of my own, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that . . . .”
“Yeah. A girl, Tessa. Teresa, for her mother. She’s in Holy Name Convent’s boarding school, out in California. I’ll look after Tom like he was my own kid, Beth, I promise.”
Beth said slowly, “All right. I’ll know he’s okay if he’s with you and Tonio.” She stood up, with an air of having settled everything.
Tommy asked, “Can I see Dad before I go, Mother?”
“Son, he’s still doped—he wouldn’t know you. He didn’t know me when they let me in to see him this morning.” Beth’s hand, firm and cold, trembled a little in her son’s. Tommy’s chest tightened as he kissed her.
“Gosh, Mother, when will I see you and Dad again?”
“We’ll keep in touch. I’ll get the route from Billboard and send you a card whenever I can.”
Angelo leaned over and gave Beth a light kiss on the cheek. “That’s from Margot. Now, don’t you worry, Beth, we’ll look after Tommy for you.”
“Bless you, Angelo. You be a good boy, Tom, and don’t give the Santellis any trouble.”
He reassured her, but he felt, as he watched his mother walk back toward the hospital gate, that she had already forgotten him again.
CHAPTER 14
The old blue and white trailer that was the home of the Santellis on the road was neither large nor new; it had the haphazard look of a home no woman’s hand has touched in a long time. Nevertheless, there was none of the squalor of some performers’ quarters. Tonio Santelli never forgot, or allowed his family to forget, that they were the aristocracy of the circus. Not for him, or anyone working under him, the slipshod glitter of “up front” concealing backstage dirt or tawdriness. Practice clothes might be shabby, thriftily worn threadbare, but they were mended and immaculate. Angelo was not too old to be scolded for an unmended rip in a sweater seam, and however early the rigging men might appear to start setting poles, Antonio Santelli appeared to supervise them combed and clean-shaven, his mustaches damp and smelling of soap.
Three things had been trained into Mario so young that he passed them on to Tommy almost without spoken admonition. (Even now, by automatic habit, when he was dressing before the show, Mario remembered to spread out clean and unbitten fingernails for checking. He caught himself doing it and laughed at himself, and by now it was a family joke, but Tommy knew there had been a time when it had not been a joke at all.) And Tommy had quickly learned that it was not acceptable to show up with dirty elbows or a T-shirt that really should have been in the laundry. Their stage costumes were brushed and aired after every performance, tights and robes bundled up and taken to the laundry or the nearest self-service washhouse. The trailer, Tommy thought sometimes, was kept neater than his mother kept hers.
At the center was a small kitchen, crowded with a two-burner stove, a tiny icebox, a sink. There was a toilet and washbasin, but no shower; in the days when it had been built, house trailers had no such luxuries. “After all,” Mario told him once, half in apology, “we were all brought up playing under canvas, and you get used to taking your bath, washing your tights, and soaking your feet, all in your bucket. In the dressing top, everybody gets two buckets of water—period. If you want a hot bath, you have to wait for the big towns where you can find a swimming pool or public bath.”
At the back of the trailer, slatted wooden doors closed off a closet-like bedroom, which Angelo shared with his father. At the front, two short upholstered benches opened out into narrow, rather hard beds, and this was where Mario and Tommy slept.
As the youngest man in the act, Tommy had the traditional responsibility for all kinds of small chores. Even star billing, if by chance the youngest man achieved it—as was the case with Mario this year—could not exempt him from the traditional family chores assigned to the youngest. Tommy, living with his parents, had been spared some of them; now they all took it for granted that he would take over.
Actually Tommy found he enjoyed the chores: going with Mario in each town to drop off clothes at the laundry or to wash tights and sweaters in a self-service washhouse, getting late supper after the night show and clearing it away again, checking the trailer for misplaced articles before they pulled out, stringing clotheslines, patching costumes, hanging up wet tights. It kept him too busy for much worrying about his father. As they played through town after town, and then state after state, he settled into a routine of practice, performance, work, and sleep that left little room for anything else.
They moved into Lawton, Oklahoma, through a gray squall line. A day-long downpour effectively drenched any thought of an evening performance, and Lambeth canceled the show, growled, and talked gloomily of consulting a fortune-teller instead of the local weather bureau. Most of the performers, however, after long runs and two outdoor performances a day, were glad to have a whole day and evening off.
Toward dusk Angelo came to the trailer to shave and change his clothes, and found Tommy tucked away at the kitchen table with his lesson books.
“Kid, I’m going to a movie in town with Margot. If you want to hunt up Ellen or Little Ann, I’ll drop you kids off somewhere.”
“Thanks,” Tommy said glumly, “but Little Ann’s gone to bed with an earache; didn’t Margot tell you? And Ellen’s gone to something at the Baptist church with her family, some kind of strawberry supper or something. They asked me to go, but I figured I didn’t like shortcake enough to sit through all that praying. So I guess I’ll catch up on my lessons and mail the whole lot off to that correspondence school in Baltimore and not have to mess around with them for a month or so. The last card I got from Mother said to be sure I kept my lessons up.”
“Papa’s gone to town. He knows a guy here who used to be a rigging man with Woods-Wayland Shows, so he went to have supper with him, meet his wife and grandchildren. You think Matt’s going to want a ride to town?” Angelo was knotting his tie.
“No, he went to play cards with some of the crew.”
Angelo gave an expressive snort. “Well, he can’t do much helling around with what money we get on the road!” By long-standing family agreement, Papa Tony handled Santelli finances during the season, giving out only small amounts of what he called
“cigarette money” to the others. At the end of the season, money was divided up—or, in Tommy’s case, banked—for the performers. Tommy got three dollars a week pocket money, but since that was more spending money than his parents had ever given him, he was content. With shoelaces two for a nickel, ice cream sodas fifteen cents, and movies thirty-five cents, he had little use for money.
“You going to be all right here alone, Tom? Don’t sit up too late ruining your eyes with those damn Batman comics,” Angelo admonished, and left.
Tommy worked for an hour on his lessons, then put his books away and stretched out on his bunk with a comic book.
He had been reading for about half an hour when Mario came in, drenched to the skin. He flung off his wet shirt and got a towel from the closet.
“Going out again?” Tommy asked.
“Guess not. I lost ninety-three cents and decided I’d had enough high finance for one evening. These jerky little towns here in the Bible Belt where they still have local option, they bootleg Mexican beer up from the border, and it tastes like unsalted horse piss . . . . Hell, the lemonade you get at the grease wagon is better to drink, and has more of a kick! I thought you were going to town with Angelo.” Mario came and bent over the bunk. “What you reading?”
“Comic books.”
Mario riffled through them. “Green Lantern—Superman—Captain Marvel—Mandrake the Magician—never knew you went for this kind of stuff.” He picked up a Batman comic and leafed through the pages. “This one slays me.” He pointed to a picture of Batman and Robin on a trapeze at an angle no trapeze could ever have reached without the immediate repeal of the law of gravity, in attitudes guaranteed to rip several muscles in their arms.
“I bet the guy who draws this stuff never even saw a good flying act!” Tommy shoved the comic books off the sofa. Mario read a lot on the road—detective magazines, science fiction, air-war pulps—but Tommy knew he thought comic books infantile, and he had almost stopped reading them when Mario was around.
Mario took off his shoes. “Poker’s a dumb way to kill an evening anyhow. I’d rather read a good book any old time. Only if I don’t spend some time with the other guys they get to thinking I’m a standoffish bastard, and I’ve already got to live down that stuff about teaching in a ballet school. But damned it I care about sitting around half the night swapping dirty jokes and getting sick on that lousy beer!”
“I got to put a stamp on my math papers for the school. You got a three-cent stamp?”
Obligingly Mario looked in his wallet. “Yeah, just one. This the letter?” Mario stamped the envelope, laid it back on the kitchen table, and came back into the front room. Abruptly there was a crash of thunder and the lights in the trailer went off.
Mario laughed in the darkness. “That’ll teach Lambeth to try and save gas for the generator truck by tyin’ in to the city power lines! I knew that was going to happen sooner or later. I’d sure like to know how they’re doing on that poker game!”
“Probably lighted a candle. My mother does.”
“Yeah—and that sleight-of-hand artist, that Cliff, pockets all the aces while they’re doing it!” The lights flickered on again. “Come on, let’s fold out the beds before they go off again for good.”
They folded out the beds, then got in and turned out the lights. Lightning flickered outside, in great white sheets. Tommy heard Mario sigh and turn over restlessly.
“Asleep?”
“Hell, no. Who could sleep in this racket?” Mario sat up, his face very distinct in a sudden flare of lightning. The trailer seemed to snap and shake with the rolling crash of the thunder.
“Mario—”
“Yeah?”
“Mind if I—crawl in with you a while?”
The white light darkened, putting Mario’s face out like a lamp. There was a flicker of dead silence, giving Tommy time to hear what he had said, before Mario replied diffidently, “Sure. If you want to.”
Tommy flung back his blanket. As he started to step across the worn flooring between them, Mario sat up. “Listen, Tom. Slip the bolt on the door first. Just in case. Okay?”
Rather shakily, Tommy obeyed. Mario rolled over to make room for him. Tommy stretched out on his back. Mario turned on his side, facing him, one arm folded under his head. He reached out with his free hand and drew the blanket up over them both.
“Now, as the ghost said, we’re all locked in for the night.”
Tommy laughed, feeling his breath catch. “I’m sorry for the poor damned soul that has to haunt a house on a night like this. Specially if the roof leaks.”
“Aaaah, I bet the ghost who has a nice chilly house to haunt is the envy of every damned soul in the graveyard.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Mario?”
“I used to think I did,” Mario said in a low voice. “Liss and I used to say that old Mario di Santalis—the first one—haunted the practice room at home. We’d scare ourselves till we were afraid to go down there after dark.”
As always when he was nervous or embarrassed, Tommy overreacted by clowning. “Aw, you just know he’s turning over in his grave when you go fooling around down there.”
Silence, rattling rain, and a nearer crash of thunder. Mario reached out and touched Tommy’s bare shoulder; he wore only the bottoms of his pajamas. He asked, “What you thinking about?”
“I guess—the night we rode in the rigging truck. It was thundering that night, too.”
“I thought maybe you were.” Mario rose on his elbow and leaned over Tommy. A flare of lightning brightened in the trailer, showing his face tense and pale, then darkened again. He said, “Or maybe—another time.” He touched Tommy very gently in the darkness and murmured, “Well?”
Shy again, Tommy turned his face away. “What’s the matter?” Mario asked softly, “scared to?”
“Not—not exactly—” Tommy flinched as an unusually bright bolt of lightning sizzled away. “Golly! I bet that hit something close by!’
“There are tornado warnings out,” Mario said. “One of the guys had a radio on. We had a blowdown in Kansas when I was a kid—turned the Big Top inside out. Good thing Big Jim didn’t have them set the wire rigs. I remember one time—”
A blow of blue light shocked the room bright as day, and simultaneously a wild crash of noise rocked the trailer. Mario caught Tommy in his arms, and the boy cried aloud in involuntary terror.
“Oh, Jesus,” Mario whispered in the apocalyptic blackness and silence that closed down seconds later, “that must have hit right outside! Maybe it hit the trailer! Tommy, you okay?”
“Sure,” Tommy said shakily. “Just—just scared. But they say if you hear it, it didn’t hit you.”
He was suddenly very much aware of the weight of Mario’s warm body lying on his, holding him close. Mario started to shift his weight a little, and Tommy pulled him down so that their bodies were touching full-length. He said defiantly, “I’m awake this time. And—and I know you are. An’ I know what I’m doing!”
He had time to feel his heart pounding in a sudden, terrified anticipation of rejection before Mario sighed and, deliberately, leaned down and kissed him.
It had never occurred to Tommy that Mario would kiss him like that; and then he realized that until this moment he had never known anything at all about kissing. He accepted that first kiss childishly, almost passively, but by the time Mario kissed him again—a space of perhaps ten seconds—he knew, still formlessly, the space of the chasm he had crossed, literally in a blink of lightning.
It was no longer a matter of a furtive and rather scary little game, played in the dark, of agreement to something really rather unpleasant for the sake of a moment’s excitement. It was not that at all. He didn’t know, yet, quite what it would be instead, but he was eager to find out. A flash of lightning, rather less catastrophic this time, showed him Mario’s face again, and Tommy, now quite free of any embarrassment or shyness, reached up and drew Mario down to him and kissed him again
.
Mario asked, hesitating, “Do you want to—?” Tommy realized that Mario was still talking to him like the kid he had been, that first time. Suddenly Tommy was ashamed, ashamed to the point of sickness, of his former pretense. How he had pretended to be asleep, his concealment of the sneaked, hidden pleasure. The way he felt now, that was a whole world different. He wasn’t at all ashamed or worried about it now. But he knew that Mario didn’t realize how much had changed inside him, that Mario was afraid to ask anything more of him, any more than that same thing: permission to fondle his passive body, the reassurance that at least he would make no actual protest. A sudden, almost anguished compassion overcame him as he realized, He thinks even that’s a lot to ask me!
Fumbling for a way to express this new knowledge, Tommy put his arms around Mario’s waist, very much conscious of the naked flesh, trying, with that new impulse of tenderness, to caress him. Childishly, with little pats, he groped, through his own inexperience, for some word or touch that could convey what he felt.
“Sure, I want to,” he whispered. “I thought you could figure that out. Only—only—I mean, what do you want, really? All the way, I mean. You’ve just been—been fooling around, haven’t you? Not really wanting to—to try anything you think might—might scare me or bother me—”
“Yes,” said Mario, in a startled whisper, “but I didn’t realize you knew it. How did you know that?”
Unconscious of the crude poetry in it, Tommy said matter-of-factly, “The way you kissed me told me how much more there ought to be to—”
Mario’s mouth cut off the rest. Held close, shaken, almost ecstatic in that bruising embrace, Tommy could still feel some terrible, tense control in the man, as if, even so urged, Mario still feared. “Oh, God, you’re just a kid, just a little kid,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I ought to be horsewhipped—dammit, Tommy, do you know they could put me in jail for this?”
“Who’s going to tell ’em, if you don’t?” Tommy’s voice failed him there. His hands, already learning gentleness from the ache in what they touched, went out in a fumbling, ignorant, but tender appeal, trying to ease and reassure that awful, tense constraint.
The Catch Trap Page 26
